NEW YORK TIMES review of INTO? by North Morgan:
“Into?” pulls off a wild feat: a hyperactive transcript of a life spent online that takes you outside of your own. We have more texts, sexts, Grindr messages, FaceTime calls and Skype than spoken dialogue — all of which brilliantly recreate the itchy lure of the +1 notification, the little red pimple we can’t wait to pop.
Our narrator, Konrad Platt — who, with 42,000 followers, is an Instagram heavyweight — moves from London to Los Angeles after a big breakup. We’re drawn into an MDMA-fueled sex parade that roams from the gym to clubs to random men’s beds and even to Buffalo at one point. Buffalo!
Konrad speaks in a wandering, hyperbolic stream of consciousness, and his run-on sentences are annoying at the outset. But once you’re comfortable inside Konrad’s spazzy head, it’s a fun, and devastating, ride. He’s sharply funny, self-aware and heartbreakingly honest about internet culture. “At 6:45 a.m. I wake up again, go to the bathroom, take a mirror selfie demonstrating my abs looking particularly violent, because all of these pills dehydrate the hell out of me, and post it on Instagram. I wait until it’s had at least 350 likes before feeling like I’m worth something as a human being. This feeling lasts about two minutes.”
The author doesn’t hold back. Sex isn’t coy or offscreen, or built up like a reward for reading so many pages. It’s front and center; it’s hot, but sometimes terrible and awkwardly tearful; it can ruin us even as it compels us.
Konrad spends a lot of time at the gym, where some of the novel’s most cutting social commentary takes place. He obsesses over bulking up to fit into a subset of gay culture he identifies as “masc musc bros.” But it’s not as simple as having the right body type. We meet “masc” bros with deeply internalized homophobia and self-hatred that they smother in wine and MDMA (and Xanax, Ambien, coke, Klonopin). Konrad navigates a community that’s outwardly defined by inclusivity, open arms and no judgment, but he also finds it painfully exclusive and cliquey. “Heteronormative males are what … the majority of us want to be,” he says, and also what they fantasize about sexually. Konrad doesn’t want to live in a world where gay men are bullied into their own self-imposed stereotypes. “Yet here I am, going to the gym every day in a backward baseball cap supporting a sports team that I’ve never seen play.”
So, yeah, I fell in love with Konrad. Then I stalked Morgan on Instagram and wanted us to be best friends, but maybe not do as many drugs as Konrad does. “Into?” has a sense of urgency — “You must read this now!” I told a friend, shoving my copy into his hands. The novel is not clunking around with the literary halo of high advances and M.F.A. pedigree and overthought adjectives, but it’s a brutal story about loneliness in this hyperactive social media age that was bursting to be told.
